If there were enough of these copper pipes, the balls would strike many of them on the way down. If I wanted to cover an octave of pitches, the shortest pipe would be 70% the length of the larger pipe:

If there were enough of these copper pipes, the balls would strike many of them on the way down. If I wanted to cover an octave of pitches, the shortest pipe would be 70% the length of the larger pipe:

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[[File:colinsul_pipe-calculation-crop.png|center|720px]]

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Not quite sure how to mount them, pictured is an idea with nails and rubber bands which could work, but could prevent balls from bouncing well.

Not quite sure how to mount them, pictured is an idea with nails and rubber bands which could work, but could prevent balls from bouncing well.

Revision as of 22:39, 27 January 2013

Contents

Giant Reverberant Object

The idea here is that there is some giant object that is very loud and people can throw things at it or play with things that are attached to it and bang against it. Pictured are a few ways to mount "balls" (I imagine rubber) to it so they can be used repeatedly without bouncing all over the room.

Pinball Shooter

Some sort of pinball like shooting device where participants can fire balls at hanging/mounted resonant plates at different pitches. The balls then fall into a funnel and return to the shooter. Would probably be impractical unless contained in some sort of clear box with walls.

Gravity Pinball

Balls are thrown in the top, they bounce off of hanging or mounted resonant bowls or plates, and then return to the front of the box so they can be dropped in again. The most important part would be that the bowls were pitched or rang well when struck by the balls. Contact microphone on a resonant plate on the back of the box?

Glockenspiel Hacking

Upon thinking of bouncy-balls, I remembered these rubber jumper things that I used to love when I was a child. I remember being fascinated because I could not predict accurately when the things would "pop" up, it was slightly different each time.

What if you let one loose between two glockenspiels? It would "strike" the glockenspiel on the bottom when it jumps up and then the one on the top when it rises.

I can imagine some other configurations of hacked glockenspiel parts. Maybe some sort of circular arrangements overlapping one another vertically.

If we could prepare many of them simultaneously and then drop them all into a system so they would all strike at about the same, I may lose a few hours of my life playing with it.

Copper-Pipe Glockenspiel and Gravity Pinball

My favorite idea so far in terms of practicality and playfulness is to combine the glockenspiel hacking with the gravity pinball idea. Instead of having hanging or mounted bowls as pictured above, creating copper-pipes that are tuned appropriately. From a top-down view:

If there were enough of these copper pipes, the balls would strike many of them on the way down. If I wanted to cover an octave of pitches, the shortest pipe would be 70% the length of the larger pipe:

Not quite sure how to mount them, pictured is an idea with nails and rubber bands which could work, but could prevent balls from bouncing well.

Also pictured is an idea of having some plungers on the back to change the frequency of the pipes. Maybe these plungers could have notches in them to tune the pipes to desired pitches?

I think I will experiment this week with mounting techniques and pluging a pipe.